Click below to listen to the narration:
o...gather close...good friends and kin...and warm your hands from cold...i’ve walked the breadth of winter’s land where quiet stories unfold...from eastern bays to prairie roads i’ve carried what i’ve heard...and now i sing the country’s week in the measure of a wandering word...in the east the tale begins... my friends...with ice bitten breath and bone...pimicikamak’s steadfast holdouts keep warming hands alone...they lean above their borrowed stoves while the cracking river tells an ancient story breaking through its frozen citadels...community papers whisper soft of neighbours keeping guard...sharing soup and blankets freely when the nights grow hard...for winter is a hallway long where every door must stay...a lantern’s width of welcome wide to keep the cold at bay...then west to montreal i roam...where boulevards resound with footsteps of revolutions born on distant ground...but sherbrooke’s pages glow with lamps...with teach ins lighting air...and granby’s children learn why chants in farsi wander there...ontario stands in middle stretch...a hinge of frost and steel...where nuclear pacts cross winter lines...and councils weigh the deal...local weeklies speak in hush of tremors close to home...a fraud...a blade...new laws of paint on fences...weathered bone...then prairie winds begin their song...a cross the open plain...a school bus turned to gaming hall...a storm of blinding grain...yet halls fling wide...and farmers wait for roads to rise again...by week’s end...friends...the country feels like breath on frosted glass...fragile...fogged...but living still...as all these stories pass...